President Obama in search of a signature line

With the right audience, in the right moment,
Barack Obama
is an exceptional speaker, someone who invites comparison to such masters of oratory as Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. He can also be a bore.

By now, we will know if Obama overcame this paradox in his second inauguration speech.

He’s previously been a spotty performer, even considering how good he can be at his best. He can be better with a script and a teleprompter than he is in extemporaneous settings, where he tends to be cautious and “high self-monitoring", in the terminology of experts. He sometimes seems to choose his words only after mulling every conceivable way they’ll be twisted by enemies.

At his very worst, as during the first presidential debate last year, he can be disengaged and grumpy.

Academics in political communication say that, although Obama has some signature speeches, he had no signature line prior to the inauguration.

There was no equivalent of, for example, Reagan’s “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" or JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you". He had never produced a phrase as president as memorable as Franklin Roosevelt in March, 1933 in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

His most famous words included “hope," “change," “change we can believe in" and “yes, we can" – the buzzwords of his first campaign.

One of his best speeches was in 2008 when he won the Iowa caucuses –a black man running in a nearly all-white state against the Clinton machine, according to David Birdsell, a dean at Baruch College. His tone had the cadence of a preacher: “They said – they said – they said this day would never come," Obama said. “They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned, to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do."

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Perhaps his most effective speech previously was in March 2008. It explained his long association with controversial minister Jeremiah Wright. Obama spoke of black anger, white resentment, stylistic differences in church worship and “a racial stalemate", all framed against his belief that Americans of diverse backgrounds share a common purpose.

Kathryn Olson, professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, says, “The moment was right, his take was right, it had the perfect pitch of what he does well which is reaffirm common values, share a vision in broad strokes rather than in detail."

Few remember Obama’s first inaugural address which lacked a headline phrase or what the professors call a “digestive statement".

“It certainly wasn’t his best speech," Olson says. “But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the words or how he spoke them. It was his presence that reaffirmed the common values he reiterated in his speech. He almost could not have failed."

One tough critic of his rhetoric is Kathleen Jamieson, a professor of communication and co-author of Presidents Creating the Presidency. She marks him down for rhetorical failures and missed opportunities.

“The expectations created by the press in 2008 were unsatisfiable," Jamieson says. “The notion that the new Pericles had entered the United States discourse arena was out there. If that is the expectation, no rhetoric of governance was going to satisfy it."

Obama may turn out to be remembered for his second inaugural address. That, after all, was the occasion of Lincoln’s greatest speech (“With malice toward none, with charity for all"). Even if Obama has countless speeches ahead of him, Monday was a chance for words that will stay in the nation’s memory forever.